A/N: Just so everyone knows, this story is complete. I just don't want to post the entire story in one go. The next chapter will be up in a day or so.
Putting my stethoscope around my neck my heart rate increases again. I am wearing scrubs in an official capacity. This is the first time that I am wearing scrubs as a doctor and not as a kid playing dress up or a Halloween costume or a fantasy in bed with Derek. I am wearing scrubs because I might be saving a person's life today. I am a doctor. I am also pretty freaking terrified.
Residents, who also are wearing the same light blue scrubs as interns, start listing off their new students. Many of my fellow interns are laughing and joking as they get to know each other but I am a little worried that if I open my mouth I will vomit because of the adrenaline racing through me.
After I look around the locker room I notice something upsetting and turn to the Asian woman whose locker is next to my own, "Only six women out of twenty."
"Yeah. I hear one of them's a model." She says as she shoves her leather boots at the bottom of her locker, we have only been in the locker room for ten minutes and hers is already a disaster zone, "Seriously, like that's going to help with the respect thing?"
"You're Cristina, right?" I ask as I stand up. Maybe today will not be as terrifying as I have expected, so far it seems like I am making a friend, or at least an ally.
She puts her white coat on and I wonder if she is as thrilled to be wearing hers as I am to be wearing my own, "Which resident you assigned to?" Cristina asks me, "I got Bailey."
"The Nazi? Yeah, me too."
A nervous looking guy calls to us from across the room, "You got the Nazi?" If I remember correctly from last night, which after all the alcohol I am not so certain I do, his name is George, "So did I. At least we'll be tortured together, right? I'm George O'Malley, uh, we met at the mixer," I smile a little at him and then look down. Honestly, I am surprised I actually remembered his name, "You had a black dress with a slit up the side, strappy sandals…" Cristina and I exchange a look. This kid clearly has a crush on me. When I tell Derek about him later we will probably both get a decent laugh out of it. George slouches, "Now you think I'm gay." He misinterpreted mine and Cristina's eye contact conversation. While I am not wearing my wedding ring now, as it would get in the way of gloves and other medical things as I explained to Derek, I was last night. George managed to remember everything about me the night before other than the fact that I had my ring on.
"Uh-huh," Cristina dismisses him as she walks away. The look she gives me before she leaves tells me she remembers seeing my wedding ring. Thinking about my two rings which are sitting safely at the bottom of my scrub shirt pocket, I wonder how anybody could possibly miss seeing the diamond from my engagement ring. Derek always tells me how he knows that I don't appreciate flashy things but that he loves me so much that he needed to get something that screams it. While I don't say it often, I do love my ring despite its size.
I barely listen to George as he stutters an explanation as to why he remembers what I wore last night, "No," He tells me, "I-I'm not gay, it's, ah, it's just that, you know, you were, I mean, you were very, unforgettable." I spare him a kind smile and pray that he doesn't think it means I like him like he likes me. He is still talking as a resident calls my name, as well as Cristina, George, and one other's. I start walking towards the man who called my attention as George mutters, "And I'm totally forgettable." Part of me pities him. He isn't forgettable, he just isn't my type. He wouldn't have been my type even if I wasn't happily married.
Cristina confronts the doctor that called our names and asks if he is Bailey. We're directed towards the end of the hall.
Looking out the locker room door our eyes land on the doctor known as the Nazi. She isn't what I expected. Judging by Cristina's question of, "That's the Nazi?" She feels the same way. I honestly don't know what I expected. I think maybe a man more imposing than Derek and angrier than my mother. Instead, the short woman at the end of the hall who is going through a chart with a nurse is the reality.
"I thought the Nazi would be a guy." George says, as we start walking towards our resident.
"I thought the Nazi would be…" I make a face trying to picture the man I envisioned, "The Nazi."
A beautiful but panicked looking intern joins the three of us. I assume she's Bailey's fourth intern. As we approach she says, "Maybe it's professional jealousy. Maybe she's brilliant, and they call her Nazi because they're jealous. Maybe she's nice." My first thought is this girl hasn't spent a lot of time near surgeons if she thinks that.
Cristina stops walking and watches the frazzled blonde walk in front of us. She snipes, "Let me guess. You're the model." She turns around to glare at Cristina, which only confirms the assumption.
The girl actually smiles at the doctor known as the Nazi and says, "Hi, I'm Isobel Stevens, but everyone calls me Izzie."
Bailey gives her a cold and calculating look. She glances down at her outstretched hand and back up to her smiling too pretty face. Instead of replying she turns to the other three of us and says, ": I have five rules. Memorize them." She directs her first rule to Izzie's still offered hand, "Rule number one, don't bother sucking up, I already hate you, that's not gonna change." She goes on to direct our attention to the nurses' station and an array of supplies she has laid out before us, "Trauma protocol, phone lists, pagers. Nurses will page you, you answer every page at a run. A run, that's rule number two." Izzie and Cristina scamper to grab their packets and pagers. I make a mental note to thank Derek for letting me read through those very same packets a few nights before. Grabbing my pager but forgoing the packets, I follow the others down the hall, "Your first shift starts now and lasts forty-eight hours. You're interns," I listen to her put us in our place intently but at the same time I can almost predict what she is going to say as Derek and I have already had this discussion. We walk full speed across the bridge and it feels weird doing this without Derek because every other time I've been in the hospital since the move two weeks ago he has been by my side, "grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain, you run labs, write orders, work every second night till you drop and don't complain!" All four of us interns step into an on-call room for a moment. My face turns red and I hope nobody notices the blush. The only thought is that the week before, after Derek's first shift and nearly three days apart, the two of us had a really rough round of sex in that very room, "Attendings hog them, sleep when you can, where you can, which brings me to rule number three," Part of me wonders, as I listen to Bailey rant, if Derek has given off a similar speech, "if I'm sleeping, don't wake me, unless your patient is actually dying. Rule number four, the dying patient better not be dead when I get there, not only would you have killed someone, you would have also woke me for no good reason, we clear?"
I raise my hand, as it seems Bailey has completed her lecture, "You said five rules. That was only four."
Her pager beeps and I know what is going to happen a second before it does, "Rule number five. When I move, you move." As the five of us sprint down the hallway I wonder if Bailey timed out her speech so that someone could page her at that very moment.
We follow Bailey out onto the helipad. As I wrestle with the gurney I realize whoever is in that helicopter is my first ever patient. I feel a little sick thinking that whoever it is will live or die according to me. This is a lot of pressure.
"What do we got?" Bailey asks the paramedics as we roll the patient out of the helicopter.
"Katie Bryce, fifteen-year-old female, new onset seizures, intermittent for the past week, ID lost en route, started grand mal seizing as we descended." As we work on Katie in a patient room there is a strange dance that seems to be happening. All four of us are trying to help her as she seizes as Bailey stands to the side and barks orders. Through all of this nurses' hands reach in and out adjusting or applying monitors and facilitating in our attempts to help Katie.
An attending, I know this because he is wearing the same indigo scrubs I find Derek so attractive in, enters the room, "So I heard we got a wet fish on dry land?"
"Absolutely Dr. Burke," Bailey replies. It's strange, because I've laughed about interns not knowing what they're doing with Derek before, but being one and being treated this way makes everything I've said seem wrong. Burke and I make eye contact and without him telling me I know he knows who I am. He's an attending, he's probably spoken to Derek and maybe even seen pictures of me.
"Dr. Bailey, I'm gonna shotgun her."
I'm about to ask what that means when Bailey explains to us, "That means every test in the book, CT, CBC, chem. seven, a tox screen," She might be known as the Nazi, but maybe she isn't an awful teacher, or at least I hope she isn't, "Cristina, you're on labs, George, patient workups, Meredith, get Katie for a CT, she's your responsibility now."
Oh my god, I am on my own. I'm so nervous I can't even find a little joy in Izzie having to do rectal exams all day. At least, judging by the assignments anyway, it seems Bailey doesn't know that I'm married to the head of a department. She strikes me as the type of woman who would put me on rectals for my entire intern year for that.
